Monday, January 26, 2009

Tired and Old

I'm amazed at how beat up I feel right now. It seems to me that I'm not doing nearly the volume of exercise I've done in past winters, yet I feel tired and beat up all the time.

Friday after work, I went out for a snowshoe run. The day had gotten warm and the snow was soft. It took me 75 minutes to cover 4 miles. It seemed like every step the snowshoes would sink into the soft snow and slip back a bit. It wasn't my slowest time for this loop this winter, but it was also far from my fastest.

I skied both days this weekend, but my total volume of skiing wasn't that high. It was simply too windy and too cold to be outside all day. Saturday morning, we got in three fast runs in training. But, in my 5.5 hours with my group of girls, we only did 6 runs. The wind chill just made them too uncomfortable and my top two priorities when I'm teaching are safety and fun. So, we took lots of breaks and we had a fun day, but not a truly difficult day.

Sunday morning training was done very quickly. It was even colder and windier than Saturday, but the snow guns had been blowing on a steep double-black diamond run for almost 24 hours and we had to ski it. The run was amazing - soft silky snow, sweet easy turns - very forgiving despite the steepness of the run. We had to do it again despite how cold we were.

With my ski group, we skied a warm-up run and then I took them to the double-black run. We skied it once and they loved it. We skied it again and they still loved it. But, everyone was freezing. The chair rides were almost unbearable for children. So, I took them to the gym for the afternoon and we spent some time on the climbing wall and some time in the pool. At 3:00 when I handed them back to their parents, they were safe and happy.

So, despite an easier-than-normal ski weekend, I'm still sore. My left hamstring is sore from interval work last week. My right elbow and wrist are still sore and not really improving. My left Achilles is a bit sore from being stretched on an awkward ski turn on Saturday.

Today, I slept in. Tonight, I'm going for a deep tissue massage, seeing someone I've never seen before. I think I need to spend more time with my foam roller, working on some of the sore spots on my body.

Last week, I lifted twice, skied twice, and ran/snowhoed for 6 hours and 20 minutes. My goal for the week had been 5-7 hours, so I hit that. I shouldn't feel so tired and beat up from that, unless I'm getting old.

I've heard that steroids, HGH, and other performance enhancing drugs help with recovery. Maybe you would feel better AND perform better if you took them. I'm sure you won't get tested any time soon. Hahahaha I'm so funny!

(Now YOU'RE the one messing with me! My security word is "controd," which doesn't actually mean anything but sounds damned dirty when pronounced.)

But, I profess to like the bitter cold. It was 0F when I went out snowshoeing this morning and I enjoyed myself.

I had my annual physical yesterday and the doc didn't suggest any performance enhancing drugs. I'm sure I can find some sort of "life extension" clinic somewhere, fill out a web form, and they'll send me all the HGH and testosterone I want, for a nomimal fee, of course.

controd - Hah! That sort of reminds me of your biking nemesis - CoaPB. Dangit. I tried to put a font tag in there to make "CoaPB" come out as pink, but they don't allow that tag in comments.